Your State, in extending its national defense organization by the creation of community councils, is in my opinion making an advance of vital significance. It will, I believe, result when thoroughly carried out in welding the Nation together as no nation of great size has been welded before. It will build up from the bottom an understanding and sympathy and unity of purpose and effort which will no doubt have an immediate and decisive effect upon our great undertaking. You will find it, I think, not so much a new task as a unification of existing efforts, a fusion of energies now too much scattered and at times somewhat confused into one harmonious and effective power.

It is only by extending your organization to small communities that every citizen of the State can be reached and touched with the inspiration of the common cause. The schoolhouse has been suggested as an apt though not essential center for your local council. It symbolizes one of the first fruits of such an organization, namely, the spreading of the realization of the great truth that it is each one of us as an individual citizen upon whom rests the ultimate responsibility. Through this great organization we will express with added emphasis our will to win and our confidence in the utter righteousness of our purpose.

THE WHITE HOUSE,

March 13, 1918.

WOODROW WILSON.

[Letter to chairmen of State Councils of Defense.]

FOREWORD.

The challenge of the World War to all thoughtful people is to organize human life on saner and juster lines in the construction of a better sort of world. This bulletin aims to make a suggestion toward an answer to this challenge.

The sorrow and tragedy of the war cause men and women everywhere to ask themselves not only what sort of a world they ought to work for, but also how and where they can begin to work for it. To find a practical answer to these questions is the persistent prayer of all who believe in democracy. Honest prayer is the expression of a dominant desire for what we believe is best and also the willingness to cooperate in bringing it to pass. The following pages are addressed to those who are willing to cooperate in answering their own prayers, to those who know what sort of world they ought to work for but are at a loss to know what is the best instrument to be used for constructing it. This bulletin suggests such an instrument.

It is a curious fact that usually it is comparatively easy to interest ten men in an indefinite scheme about which they have nothing to do but talk, whereas it is difficult to induce one man to undertake a more modest but definite piece of constructive work. But the war has awakened the desire of all people of good will to do something. They want to make a motor-reaction to the war's challenge. They say: "We see what needs to be done. What is the best instrument with which to do it? That is the difficult thing to find." The suggestion here made is intended for such people, who have discovered the futility of attempting to purify the water in a well by painting the pump, and who therefore seek a constructive plan in the process of building a better world.

The instrument here suggested is The Community Center, which may be put into operation anywhere, in city, village, or countryside. If we desire to get anywhere, we have to start from somewhere. The place to start from is where we are. The best point of contact with the world problem, raised anew by the war, is to be found in the community where we live, for the world problem exists in every community in America. All political questions, if considered fundamentally, will be found to apply to human needs which are at once

local, national, and international. The international problem is now, and has always been, how to organize and keep organized a method of mutual understanding by which nations may cooperate rather than compete with each other. The national problem is to do the same for the social and economic forces within the Nation itself. The problem in any local community is to do the same for the forces operating in that community. With reference to this present and permanent world problem the writer has attempted to answer two. questions-what is a community center, and how ought it to be organized. He has endeavored to make the answer as brief as may be consistent with clearness.

Our three most urgent national needs are to mobilize intelligence, food, and money. But it is not possible to mobilize them until we first mobilize the people. The Nation's present need has made apparent the necessity of organizing local communities. The Council of National Defense discovered it through its experience in the war. The Bureau of Education had begun the task before we entered the war. These two organizations have now united their forces for the accomplishment of their common purpose to promote community organization throughout the Nation. The slogan of the one is," Every school district a community council for national service." The slogan of the other is, "Every schoolhouse a community capitol and every community a little democracy."

President Wilson has clearly indicated the profound significance of this movement in the letter he wrote to commend it. He elsewhere says that our present need is "to arouse and inform the people so that each individual may be able to play his part intelligently in our great struggle for democracy and justice." This is a perfect statement of the aim of our movement. With the addition of one word it would be a complete description of it. That one word is "organize." The aim of the movement-to arouse and inform the people, to enable each individual to play his part intelligently-can be achieved only when the people organize themselves.

The creation of a democratic and intelligent social order is essentially the same task, whether our approach to it be local, national, or international. This fact has been clearly understood by thinkers as far back as Socrates, who said: "Then, without determining as yet whether war does good or harm, this much we may affirm, that now we have discovered war to be derived from causes which are also the causes of almost all the evil in States, private as well as public.” Anyone, therefore, who attempts to remove these causes in a local community is working at a world problem, and he who attempts to remove them as between nations is obliged, in order to preserve his honesty and self-respect, to make the same effort within his own

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nation and in his own community. It magnifies the value and stimulates one's zest in working for it to remember that a community center is the center of concentric circles which compass not only the local community but also the larger communities of the Nation and the world. To establish free trade in friendship in all three communities is the goal of the community center movement. HENRY E. JACKSON.

FEBRUARY 1, 1918.

A COMMUNITY CENTER-WHAT IT IS AND HOW

TO ORGANIZE IT.

PART I.

WHAT IS A COMMUNITY CENTER?

THE PEOPLE'S UNIVERSITY.

"All men naturally desire knowledge," is the buoyant sentence with which Aristotle begins his great book on Ethics. It states our ground of hope for the possibility of progress and for the success of democracy. No democratic form of government can long endure without popular education or the means of acquiring it. The first and chief aim of the community center movement is to deepen the content and broaden the scope of the term "education " and to extend the activities of the public schools so that they may evolve into people's universities.

When it is remembered that only 10 per cent of the adult citizens have had a high-school education and only 50 per cent have ever completed the grammar grades, it becomes apparent that one of our greatest national needs is a university for the education of grown men and women. The public school as a community center is the answer to this national need. The community center movement recognizes the fact that the mind matures more slowly than the body and that education is a life-long process. While the public school is dedicated primarily to the welfare of the child, it is becoming daily more evident that the Nation's welfare requires it to be used for adults and youths as well. Notwithstanding the fact that it is our finest American invention and the most successful social enterprise ever undertaken, its golden age lies before it. It is now being discovered anew in its possibilities for larger public service. The fact that all men naturally desire knowledge is the fact which has justified the investment of $1,347,000,000 in the publicschool equipment; it is the fact which now justifies the use of this